Happy New Year! Much as I love the holiday season, I always find I relish quiet, cool January days, settling back into work with a steaming cup of tea and plentiful (or at least more plentiful than in December) time. My WIP, the next Malcolm & Suzanne book, now has a working title, The London Gambit, and I’ve started the new year off by going over my draft of the book so.
I always say I’m the sort of writer who plots in advance, but the truth is a bit more complicated. I do need to do quite a bit of advance thinking and note taking before I can start to draft scenes. I lay out plot ideas on the wonderful Scrivener corkboard and move them around and start to build the story. But at a certain point I need to start actually drafting some of the scenes. It’s as though I need to flesh out the scenes to see how they work, how the characters interact, how different plot strands twist together. Often the very process of writing the scenes gives me additional plot ideas . And in and around writing, I’m continuing to think about the plot and making notes.
I write many of these early scenes out of order – skipping parts of the story I’m not sure of and fleshing out the scenes I know I need. Often I’m not sure where a given scene will fall in the arc of the story when I first draft it. In the past couple of weeks I’ve begun to organize the scenes I have. I spent a couple of days last week not trying to write at all, just playing with index cards on the corkboard and seeing how the story can fit together. A clear structure for the first “act” of the book emerged pretty quickly – which required some additional scenes to connect what I’d already written and sent me back to drafting new material, while I also edited the scenes I’d already written. Now I’m mulling how the second act fits together, though the turning point into Act III is clearly marked.
So for me, plotting the book and drafting scenes are inextricably intertwined, which was never more clear to me than working on The London Gambit over the past few days. While I don’t think I could write without plotting in advance, I also don’t think I could comfortably plot an entire book without fleshing out some scenes along the way. And just as stepping back and thinking about the plot gives me ideas for scenes, sometimes writing a scene gives me plot ideas.
Writers, how do you approach plotting? Has your approach changed through the years? Readers, any questions about plotting?
And to welcome in the new year, I’ve just posted a new Fraser Correspondence letter from Mélanie/Suzanne to Dorothée written in early January 1816.
Tracy Grant - Novelist 
January 11, 2013 at 2:26 am
I’ve been trying to write for a year now and I think I work more or less the same way as you do. I had, twice even, started a story by writing a full outline and even drafting scenes. All that just to realise, while writing the actual stories, that I had it all wrong. That what I wanted to write didn’t agree with the characters (or rather, the characters refused to do as I bid them), and that I needed to think all over again. I find that just as you explained, writing gives me more ideas, and I need to write to get to know the characters… It happens more often than not that I write a scene, to just erase everything and write it all over again because I realised that the way I described the characters wasn’t what I / they wanted…
Which brings another question to my mind (sorry to bother you with so many questions about writings tips and advice all the time – call me curious!)… I find that quite hard to get to know a character without writing the story. When you first wrote about Charles and Melanie, how did you get acquainted with them? Where they all shaped and clear in your mind?
Just right now, I’m trying your method, writing the scenes that I have in mind instead of trying painfully to write chronologically and remain stuck many days on one scene because I have no idea how to get my characters from one point to another! 🙂
Hoping it’s going to work… 🙂
January 11, 2013 at 5:40 pm
I was struck by your use of the words “act” and “scene.” I usually connect them with plays or film/video, but they DO seem appropriate for stories and novels as well. Tracy, I have always appreciated how you provide such clear images of your characters and settings. Do you think that your involvement with opera has influenced how you work on your books? I also believe that your books would translate wonderfully well to film.
Happy New Year!
Kay
January 11, 2013 at 10:00 pm
I love writing questions, Céline! I need to get to know my characters through writing too. Now I know Mel/Suzette and Charles/Malcolm so well I can jump into a scene with them pretty quickly. Like settling in for a chat with old friends. But it wasn’t that way at first. I wrote endless drafts of the first scene between them in Secrets of a Lady/Daughter of the Game, trying to capture who they were and what their relationship was like.
January 11, 2013 at 10:05 pm
Thanks, Kay! I like to think of my books as films as well :-). I do think my love of opera and my work in theatre influence how I write. I actually wasn’t as visualize a writer when I first started out – I tended to mostly write dialogue, like a script. I trained myself to be more visual by watching what the camera does in film, and I visualize my books like movies or plays when I write. Because of my theatre training I think I naturally think in terms of scenes and acts (and I think of my different drafts like the rehearsal process). Since Daughter of the Game, I’ve consciously written in classic three act film structure, with roughly the first quarter of the book the first act, the the two middle quarters the second act (with the midpoint at about the 50% mark), and the last quarter the third act. Once I have the plot points that pivot from Act I to Act II and from Act II to Act III identified and also the midpoint, the plot tends to fall into place.